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The good news on stuttering

MARK COLVIN: If your child has a stutter, don't despair, it's more common than you think.

Researchers in Melbourne have found that the speech impediment is twice as likely to strike pre-school aged kids as previously thought.

The good news is that most children with a mild stutter grow out of it before it becomes a serious problem in primary school.

Eliza Harvey reports.

ELIZA HARVEY: Six-year-old Dean Grimshaw is a confident talker.

DEAN GRIMSHAW: Well I do sport at school, do music. Yeah, we do read in our readers in the morning because every single hard book I get is so easy for me.

ELIZA HARVEY: But his mum, Kay, says the situation was very different three years ago.

KAY GRIMSHAW: His words were split, so they weren't whole words they were split word repetitions. His little eyes used to screw up when he was talking and trying, you know, he was trying so hard to get a word out. And sometimes it was really hard to see, you know, he was just trying to communicate with people, but yeah he was just finding it so hard.

ELIZA HARVEY: Kay Grimshaw sought help from a speech pathologist.

And she enrolled her son in a big stuttering study, run by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne. It looked at 1,600 children aged between two and four.

The lead researcher is Professor Melissa Wake.

MELISSA WAKE: What we found was that stuttering really is much more common than had previously been described. So around 12 per cent of children all together started stuttering. What this tells us is that stuttering is actually common. Usually it's mild and probably for many children it's a pre-developmental stage that they go through.

We think we've uncovered something that is probably true for all populations of children, not just Australian children, and we think we uncovered this high prevalence because we were actually asking parents every month or two to tell us if their child had started stuttering. So we were kind of uncovering it as it began.

ELIZA HARVEY: Kay Grimshaw found it comforting to know that many other families were facing a similar challenge.

KAY GRIMSHAW: Well not that I want other children to be, you know, and other parents to be feeling the same way, but, yeah, it was kind of nice to know that, you know, there is a group of us that are in the same boat and if we could help each other out then, you know, that would be great.

ELIZA HARVEY: The reported rates of stuttering in primary school aged children is a lot lower than the rates in this research.

Doctors will re-test the children in their study when they turn seven.

But Professor Melissa Wake says parents should take comfort from the data.

MELISSA WAKE: What we can say now is that for the great majority of children, and as I said, around 12 per cent of all children in the study started stuttering, that most of them don't seem to go on to become severe stutterers. And these children seem to be really well adjusted, they have great language skills, they're doing just fine.

So I think it can be a much more reassuring message for parents coming forward with a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old who has just started with some stuttering.